When you’ve got That Real Loser Energy, but hold out a desperate hope that generative images will make you as macho as you are in your imagination …

May your days, may your days, may your days be merry and bright …

¿Donde esta Santa Claus?

"Even after accounting for the upfront costs and delayed benefits, enrolling marginal applicants to public universities generates substantial net returns for society, the marginal students themselves, and the government budget." Public Universities FTW!

Grades are in. Now I’ll take a few days off and, this weekend, continue designing a new class for next term. (My third brand new class in as many terms, and just three of the ELEVEN new preps I’ve undertaken since Fall 2023.)

This is sinister. If you're wondering why so many people don't report sexual assault, this is why.

Sharing the bottom of this thread so it will read better once you scroll back to the top. @gregpak.net is SO on the money for this. PLEASE read and share. Equip others with his arguments.

50 states total minus 20 states suing must mean that 30 states are OK without a functional Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Some of the people living in those 30 states ought to be asking why.

if the president of the American Federation of Teachers—a union which represents not just primary and secondary school teachers, but also many college professors—cannot meaningfully distinguish between AI ed tech sales pitches and responsible pedagogy, she has no business representing educators.

But that’s my pull-up sweater!

This entire thread. If @aft.org and @rweingarten.bsky.social cannot or will not answer every single one of these questions, then they have no business having any say in how schools deal with the plagiarism machines.

Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing a text, writing an email, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing since the dawn of time.

And here I am, trying to help college students learn how to solve problems, take initiative, think independently, think critically, read. Randi’s AFT priorities are way over there, trying to convince people to teach software how to learn from young wetware.

These declines are MASSIVE. And the comparative silence in media coverage is absolutely DAMNING. “Why are ppl always so afraid of crime?” THIS is why. When crime goes up, media trips over itself to report it. Falls to pre-war (!!) levels? Just CRICKETS.

The guy who famously crosses every border in one night without documentation?

In 2023 I became obsessed with videos of dads in cargo shortswaiting in parking lots during Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. So when she came to town, I grabbed a camera and headed down to talk to them. I thought it'd be funny. It turned out to be something else entirely.

But if you don’t have to — I mean if your caloric intake doesn’t absolutely depend on it — consider whether you want to send a signal to managers and corporate that this is a necessary thing.

There really is no justification for this company’s existence.

Imagine signing off on a piece, seeing this response from the White House and THEN insisting your staff hold the story juuuuuust in case any officials want to sit down on camera and discuss whether they regret anything.

Not now, haunted Victorian shoes

It was getting to him.

This is as easy a test of your belief in the American system as is conceivable: Should this be an acceptable argument from a president?

This is some awkward video to be playing soundlessly in airports across the country as frazzled people undertake their holiday travel.

There’s been an interesting conversation about the spiked 60 Minutes piece, uploading, and fair use. Fair use is a tricky legal concept. Damningly vague by design, some would say. But why not couch it in legal precedence? Share the CECOT piece with Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” backing track.

Cultivation theory can absolutely be applied to apps. I would hypothesize you’d see some first order effects and, ultimately, a growing distrust of AI generated “news.” I use the term loosely here in reference to consumer perspectives.

Hey! Did you notice! The days are getting longer!

WATCH: Seriously, if you’re following ANY bike-lane debate, you HAVE TO WATCH this news story. You actually can’t make this up. Ford claims without evidence that bike-lanes are bad for small business, and THE ACTUAL BUSINESS ASSOCIATION obliterates him with data. Safe bike-lanes mean business.

"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"

For this week’s episode of Americans discovering that institutions are not annoying bureaucracies but rather the backbone of the life we take for granted, we have: Archives!

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Related, the kids are now calling both OU and Texas A&M “clown colleges,“ in case you’re wondering how this anti-intellectual BS is playing with the youths

A dissertation.

really cannot be emphasized enough that bari weiss has literally never done journalism. i don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. i mean that in the “has never performed the job she was hired to do” sense

Imagine for a second, if this were true … the offshoots of cultivation theory could be fascinating.

On quick read, this is a well-reasoned decision that gets the First Amendment law right and protects academic freedom

Sent to #Whamhalla on the shuttle from the airport to the car. (Had the shuttle been 45 seconds earlier …) This was, quite literally, the last song out of my control before Christmas. #Whamaggedon

“This is running with your words/face/sound or without. Either way. Which version represents you better?”

One of the first things I would tell sources who declined to comment on a story was that the story was going to run either way, so it was important for them to speak up now if they had something to say.

Considering the pope is already speaking about this …

Bluesky needs a medical non sequitur thread for the holidays. That cousin you haven’t seen in three decades … The person your parents know, that you don’t … or the one they went to school with … The people your people see at their regular restaurant, how’s their health? Update us in the replies.

If I may, for the non-media in the crowd, Alfonsi mentioning Wigand is a 30-year-old reference not used lightly at the former Tiffany Network. This is an internal condemnation without comparison, a reference you never hope to make, a reference entirely lost on the people that need to hear it.

In 1983 Bagdikian warned that 50 companies controlled most of the U.S. media. Can you imagine having 50? A veritable golden age of diverse ownership by comparison.

I sometimes say that it takes a lifetime to build credibility and a moment to destroy it. The sound of a proud newsroom’s credibility dying is the sound of a clock slowing, and stopping.

Thanks to Bari Weiss for testing whether the Streisand Effect still has any juice.

When you’ve lost Dylan Byers…

This might sound reasonable to people, but it means the White House can spike investigative journalism by simply not commenting.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.

All of these links went to promotion of this story earlier today. All these links are dead now — that's how thoroughly they've scrubbed this.

Look, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for this. The problem is that given who is minding the CBS News store there is every reason to suspect something more nefarious.